Walter Raleigh Quotes

79 Sourced Quotes

Our passions are most like to floods and streams;
The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb.

Walter Raleigh
Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred; also to choose such an opportunity for writing as it may be lawful to think what they will, and write what they think, which is a rare happiness of the time.

Walter Raleigh
The necessity of war, which among human actions is the most lawless, hath some kind of affinity with the necessity of law.

Walter Raleigh
The bodies of men, munition, and money may justly be called the sinews of war.

Walter Raleigh
According to Solomon, life and death are in the power of the tongue; and as Euripides truly affirmeth, every unbridled tongue in the end shall find itself unfortunate; for in all that ever I observed in the course of worldly things, I ever found that men's fortunes are oftener made by their tongues than by their virtues, and more men's fortunes overthrown thereby, also, than by their vices.

Walter Raleigh
It was well said of Plotinus, that the stars were significant, but not efficient.

Walter Raleigh
It is not truth, but opinion that can travel the world without a passport.

Walter Raleigh
No instrument smaller than the World is fit to measure men and women: Examinations measure Examinees.

Walter Raleigh
No mortal thing can bear so high a price, But that with mortal thing it may be bought.

Walter Raleigh
And when I'm introduced to one
I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!

Walter Raleigh
Never spend anything before thou have it; for borrowing is the canker and death of every man's estate.

Walter Raleigh
What is our life? A play of passion. Our mirth the music of division. Our mother's wombs the tyring houses be, Where we are drest for this short Comedy.

Walter Raleigh
God is absolutely good; and so, assuredly, the cause of all that is good.

Walter Raleigh
But in vain she did conjure him, To depart her presence so, Having a thousand tongues t' allure him And but one to bid him go. When lips invite, And eyes delight, And cheeks as fresh as rose in June, Persuade delay,-- What boots to say Forego me now, come to me soon.

Walter Raleigh
Because all men are apt to flatter themselves, to entertain the addition of other men's praises is most perilous.

Walter Raleigh
Desire attained is not desire,
But as the cinders of the fire.

Walter Raleigh
Less pains in the world a man cannot take than to bold his tongue.

Walter Raleigh
The longer it possesseth a man the more he will delight in it, and the older he groweth the more he shall be subject to it; for it dulleth the spirits, and destroyeth the body as ivy doth the old tree, or as the worm that engendereth in the kernal of the nut.

Walter Raleigh
It were better for a man to be subject to any vice than to drunkenness; for all other vanities and sins are recovered, but a drunkard will never shake off the delight of beastliness.

Walter Raleigh
Examinations are pure humbug from beginning to end.

Walter Raleigh
I shall never be persuaded that God hath shut up all light of learning within the lantern of Aristotle's brain.

Walter Raleigh
This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases and miseries.

Walter Raleigh
O eloquent, just, and mighty Death!…thou hast drawn together all the farstretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet [Here lies].

Walter Raleigh
Shall I, like a hermit, dwell
On a rock or in a cell?

Walter Raleigh
As you came from the holy land
Of Walsinghame,
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came?

Walter Raleigh
He that doth not as other men do, but endeavoureth that which ought to be done, shall thereby rather incur peril than preservation; for whoso laboureth to be sincerely perfect and good shall necessarily perish, living among men that are generally evil.

Walter Raleigh
Now what is love? I pray thee, tell.
It is that fountain and that well,
Where pleasure and repentance dwell.

Walter Raleigh
All, or the greatest part of men that have aspired to riches or power, have attained thereunto either by force or fraud, and what they have by craft or cruelty gained, to cover the foulness of their fact, they call purchase, as a name more honest. Howsoever, he that for want of will or wit useth not those means, must rest in servitude and poverty.

Walter Raleigh
Whoso taketh in hand to frame any state or government ought to presuppose that all men are evil, and at occasions will show themselves so to be.

Walter Raleigh
A professional man of letters, especially if he is much at war with unscrupulous enenemies, is naturally jealous of his privacy... so it was, I think, with Dryden.

Walter Raleigh